April 21, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
The Google Lunar XPrize, a contest offering $20 million to the first private team to send a robot to the moon—and explore the lunar surface for the first time since China’s space agency landed a rover in 2014—is now down to four competitors with just over eight months until the...

March 31, 2017
Kennedy Space Center, Florida — Elon Musk, billionaire rocket designer, was nervous watching the first-ever takeoff of a previously flown rocket, a second-time first of sorts. “I did have like two boxes of Xanax, I think that might have helped,” the SpaceX founder joked afterward, adding, “I was nervous that...

March 31, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Kennedy Space Center, Florida—Elon Musk, billionaire rocket designer, was nervous watching the first-ever takeoff of a previously flown rocket, a second-time first of sorts. “I did have like two boxes of Xanax, I think that might have helped,” the SpaceX founder joked afterward, adding, “I was nervous that I wasn’t...

March 30, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Kennedy Space Center, Florida Even before dawn, workers streamed past security into the U.S. launch complex here, intent on the routine business of the spaceport. But tonight’s launch is out of the ordinary. It’s the next milestone to fulfilling the promise Elon Musk set for his company SpaceX: to dramatically...

March 29, 2017
In one corner, we have an international, orbital laboratory that cost over $150 billion to build and operate. In the other, a $23 billion and growing program to develop a huge new deep-space rocket and spacecraft to carry humans to the moon and beyond. Now, they will face off in...

March 20, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Within a year, says Blue Origin, it will begin flying humans to the edge of space. That would grant the company, founded by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, a symbolic victory over competitors like SpaceX, Boeing and Virgin Galactic, who are also pursuing plans to fly paying passengers beyond earth’s atmosphere....

February 21, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
What you’re seeing in the video below is a 40-meter tall SpaceX rocket booster, weighing more than 20 tons, fly itself back to Earth from space and land precisely on a target at Cape Canaveral. What you may be wondering is, how did it do that? The first thing to...

February 18, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
It’s been five years since a rocket lifted off from NASA’s Launch Pad 39-A, when the final Space Shuttle mission took flight. For a moment it seemed like the pipes, tanks, and towers of the launch complex built for the US at the dawn of the space age—Apollo 11 lifted...

February 13, 2017
When US president Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gathered to condemn a North Korean missile test, they did it just fifty yards from a wedding reception at Trump’s Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago, with celebratory music underscoring the threat of nuclear warfare. That fees from that wedding, along...

January 25, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Into orbit, on the highway, over the internet and now into the ground: Is there anywhere Elon Musk won’t go to start a business? The serial entrepreneur tweeted early this morning he would soon begin digging a tunnel “starting across from my desk at SpaceX. Crenshaw and the 105 Freeway,...

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